What is New in Angular 8?

Stephen Fluin, a Developer Advocate for Angular at Google and one of the leaders of Angular 8 development, has stated in his last blog post for the Angular Blog, that Angular 8.0 and a version for Angular Ivy (Angular Ivy is a new Angular renderer, which is radically different from anything we have seen in mainstream frameworks, because it uses incremental DOM) will be ready for the second quarter of 2019, this Angular version will have Ivy as an opt-in preview.

What is new in version 8.0?

According to Fluin, before having a complete version for Ivy, there are several updates that the development team is working towards for version 8.0.

Some of the plan for version 8.0 are:

Differential Loading of Modern JavaScript: This feature expects to improve the loading speed and time to interactive (TTI) for modern browsers.

Opt-In Ivy Preview

Angular Router Backwards Compatibility: Will simplify the upgrade path for large projects.

Improved Web Worker Bundling

Opt-In Usage Sharing: Angular will begin collecting anonymous information about things like the commands used and the build speed.

Dependency Updates

What is new in Ivy?

Angular 8 Ivy

Angular version 8.0 will bring an opt-in preview of Ivy.

Angular Ivy is a new Angular renderer, which is radically different from anything we have seen in mainstream frameworks, because it uses incremental DOM.

Incremental DOM is used internally at Google and the idea is that every component gets compiled into a series of instructions, these instructions create DOM trees and update them in-place when the data changes.

Why did the Google team go with incremental DOM instead of virtual DOM?

They have one goal in mind: applications have to perform well on mobile devices. This mainly meant optimizing two things: the bundle size and the memory footprint.

The opt-in preview of Ivy that comes with Angular 8.0 will allow the user to switch between Ivy and View Engine in the project. Changing this will switch the application to be built with Ivy runtime instructions instead of ViewEngine, so the application will be built with the Ivy compiler, and any dependencies used from Angular or other 3rd parties should keep working.

This preview will contain:

Generated code easier to read and debug at runtime

Faster re-build time

Improved payload size

Improved template type checking

Backwards compatibility

This opt-in preview is focused on moving applications to the Ivy compiler and runtime instructions without requiring developers to rewrite their applications. There are many Ivy-specific APIs that will be added to the public API later as a part of Angular Labs and future stable releases, according to Fluin.

When will everything be ready?

On Fluin on words: “We can’t commit to a fixed schedule and this plan may need to change, but our plan is to enter RC in April 2019, and to release 8.0.0 with general availability about a month later. We’ll be using the opt-in preview of Ivy in 8.0.0 to validate our promises about backwards compatibility and to work on any automated migration tools we might need.”

Fluin also talked about a full Ivy rollout in version 9 that will unlock many doors for developer and teams.